Cragg Vale Walk

Inspite of a late night and possibly one more drink than was wise! Steve and I headed up to Cragg Vale for a walk on Sunday morning. I had high hopes of photographing the abandoned house and was having all sorts of creative thoughts of using the tripod and a slow shutter speed with the wind blowing the long grasses and scudding clouds. Hmm, not sure what season I thought it was when all that was going on. Leaden skies, soaked, flattened grass and nothing much to inspire as far as the eye could see! In the end we walked up to Withens Gate and then out towards Stoodley Pike although didn't go as far as the Pike itself. I did set the tripod up on a bit of gritstone but only one of the pics was useable - must remember that in sleet its a good idea to wipe the camera lens every now and again!


It was lovely to drop down off the top and out of the wind, found a short route back to Withens gate, my kind of walking!

cross at Withens Gate

There was still a fair amount of snow up by the gate, drifts that were at least 3 feet deep on the path or boggy ground were the walking options, tough call! The walls seemed to be the best source of something to photograph so I made the most of them!







The reservior still had a good bit of ice on it and where it didn't it was doing a good job of reflecting the steely sky.






Steve and Digby were not feeling creatively challenged, they were in their element.






Roll on Spring!

Tom's 16th Birthday...

will go down in history as the date that I first triggered Tom's diabetes!! Instead of a cake I decided to make him chocolate chip cookie dough brownies. In that great American tradition that if one thing is good and another is also good if you combine them then what you end up with is great - so take a pan of brownies and top them with cookie dough and chocolate chips and listen to the sound of your arteries furring up and feel the exquisite pleasure of your heart struggling to beat!

First melt a whole 250g grammes of butter over some water with 200g of dark chocolate.


Add some chopped nuts - they have healthy fats you know!


Pour this over 65g of flour, 320g of sugar and a shed load of cocoa powder


Mix well. mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.


The plan now is that you bake this for 5-10 mins less than your brownie mix would normally need. Whilst it is baking you mix another 250g of butter with another plantations worth of sugar and some flour to make a cookie dough. You are supposed to dollop or spread the cookie down onto of the brownie mix. Have you ever made brownies - they are NOT set when they come out of the oven so its a bit like the first time as a married lady you make shepherds pie - the mash splurges all the mince out of the dish and onto the work top! I resorted to plopping little flattened lumps of cookie dough onto the brownie mix. Then Tom helped add the chocolate chips and white chocolate chunks. Gilding the lily being the order of the day!





All ready for the oven.

As there was a considerable amount of cookie dough left over I decided that we needed a batch of choc chip cookies too! Inside of me there is a thin girl trying to get out - I can usually shut the skinny bitch up with a cookie!


The plan with the brownie is that you just bake it long enough to cook the edges of the dough and melt the chocolate. Any attempt to eat this before it has cooled sufficiently for the butter to harden will result in instant feelings of nausea!




As a result it was decided that the cookies had to go first.







I think they liked them!!



Now that we were all feeling really really ill it was time for Tom to open his cards and presents.



Emily's card was suitably offensive!

And he liked the one from his Granny and Grandad, been a while since we have had anything with the very hungry catepillar in our house!



Em refused to let me leave the shop until I had bought this card for Tom.


We also got him a metal model that will sit nicely with his collection of quirky things.


And finally the finished brownie...


For Tom's special birthday dinner at his request we had roast venison, parmentier potatoes, green beans and a redwine and redcurrant sauce - how sophisticated is this boy?!
Happy birthday Tom, love you.

Snow

Sometimes I take photos and I'm really blah about them. Usually I use my 50mm for portraits and my wide for landscapes. Today I whacked the zoom onto the camera and braved the permafrost that Upper Edge has become and you know what, not so blah. Not very blah at all in fact. If photography is about light and contrast winter snow and a setting sun provide the both in abundance and you'd have to be beyond useless not to get something fab from them. I am an honest kind of a gal, purty much!, so will confess where I have tweaked and cropped on the photos below and on some of them you'd have to be wearing a balaclava backwards not to spot it but where nature provided and my skills measured up Lightroom was redundant.

See what I mean? Glowing sky meets cool, cool snow. Without boring you to death light is different colour temperatures - that sky? well hot. The snow? brr chilly. Red against blue. So to expose for the snow to be the right colour the sky would become white hot (over exposed), expose for the sky and the snow disappears. Lightroom knows that I am no way good enough to deal with that so provides a nifty bit of kit which means I can filter certain areas of my photo - in this one I filtered the sky and reduced the exposure, as I had exposed for the snow when I took the pic. That puts all the detail back into the sky, then I increase the colour saturation and you get to see what was actually there, and visible to the naked eye, but beyond something as basic as a camera. Does that make sense?

I'll belt up now ok.


You didn't really think I would did you? Just tweaked the sky on this.


f-f-f-freezing!


Backward balaclave moment! Clearly the sky has been "dealt with" and I have added some fill light to the foreground too.


This time not shooting into the sun just catching its glow on the clouds no tweaking required.


Worked to death, frankly. Photography as art. I love it, I guess its fake as in not "true" but the glow from the sun setting behind her was really there, it just wasn't sepia!


bit of a bump in contrast and a slight blip on sky colour but not much else - wasn't it a stunning sunset. Bloody freezing too!


Other people had to work - spraying poo. No breeze and very cold air doesn't half make that stench linger. (if you are farmer'ish excuse my total lack of agri knowledge, well it's not like I work on a machinery magazine or anything is it!!)


Note lovely pink sky. Note also nasty brown sheeeiit on field in background!


Back to pretty.


And straight into dumb. If I was to say that this photo was taken moments after my beloved daughter had said to me "I love the idea of elves. Just imagine if behind that wall there were loads of elves all hiding." you might well anticipate what came next. (at this point its worth mentioning that she is nearly 18 and at the time was sober as a judge.) She then decided to leap over the wall and "walk like an elf". Completely forgetting that she is a) crap at leaping over walls and b) likely to fall over her own feet asleep.


Dozy mare.


This is pretty much untweaked, just a slight bump in contrast. I love the sky and the hole in the snow around the stem of the grass.


Pylons can look good in photos.


Speaks for itself.


Again nothing done apart from some subtle enhancement of what was already there.




And finally a barrage of fixings. Cropped, fill light, sky filtered to reduce exposure, increase clarity and saturation yadda yadda. Nice though?